Chapter 39: The Mate Mark

I woke at first light with the bed cold on one side and the smell of tea coming up the stairs.

Declan was in the kitchen with his shirt on and his hair wet from the tap and two cups on the table. He had put the fire in and opened the back door to let the smoke out and he was standing at the window with his back to me, looking out at the harbor.

“You are up early,” I said.

“I have not been to sleep.” He turned round. “I have been sitting in that chair since five with a cup of tea and a whole village in my head. There is a thing I have to tell you before you go out of that door and it is not a thing I want to say.”

I poured my tea and sat down. “Say it.”

“The mark is coming.” He put his hand up to his throat and touched it. “The old mark. The broken one. Last night it started to close. I felt it at about three in the morning and it has been closing all night and it is nearly shut.” He came and sat down across from me. “That is what happens when a wolf with a broken mark finds the wolf he was made for. The old mark closes and a new one comes up beside it. It will be on my throat by tonight and it will be on yours by the end of the week, and once it is on both of us there is not a wolf in this territory who will not be able to smell it.”

I put my cup down. “And she will see it.”

“She will see it and she will know that the bond she broke in December has been replaced and she will know who replaced it.” He looked at me. “She has been closing off the pack since the meeting. She has been going to the families one by one and she has been telling them a thing about you and I do not know what it is and I do not know how to find out. Tom came to my door at four this morning and he would not come in and he would not look at me and he said, Declan, I have known you all my life, and then he went away.”

“What did he mean?”

“I do not know. But I have been the Beta of this pack for twenty years and I have never had a wolf come to my door and not come in.” He got up and went to the window again. “She is doing the thing she always does. She is not coming at us with the pack. She is going to the families one by one and she is telling them a story and by Saturday morning there will not be a wolf in this village who is not afraid of you.”

I was up and halfway to the door when it opened from the outside and Padraig came in with his coat on and a piece of paper in his hand.

“I have been to Athlone,” he said. “I came back last night and I have been at the shop since then and I have not had a chance to give you this. It is from a woman who works in a post office in Athlone and she remembered your sister.” He put the paper on the table. “The letter with the Athlone postmark did not come from Athlone. It came from a woman who lives in Athlone and who sends letters on for someone else. She would not give me a name. She said, the woman who sends the letters comes to me once a month with a bundle and she pays me to post them and she does not want her name written on anything.”

“Does she know where the woman comes from?”

“She does not. But she knows this. The woman who sends the letters is a wolf and she has a mark on her throat that is broken and has not healed and she wears a scarf to hide it and she came to Athlone for the first time in April.” Padraig looked at me. “Niamh. Your sister has been sending letters from Athlone since April. She went to Athlone on the bus and she found a woman in a post office and she paid her to post her letters. And she did it because the Alpha cannot hear a thing that is written by a wolf who is not in the territory.”

I stood at the table with the paper in my hand and my sister's whole plan came clear.

“She is running a pack,” I said.

Declan turned round.

“She is running a pack and she has been since April,” I said. “She did not go north to hide. She went north to build a thing. She took the statement to the men from Galway and she took the letters to Athlone and she has been sending a copy of the shift record to a wolf in Galway for fifteen years and she wrote to Bridget in the school in Dublin. She has been building a pack for months, out of wolves the Alpha has banished and wolves the Alpha has wronged and wolves who left this territory because they could not stay.” I looked at Declan. “That is why she rejected you. Not because she did not want you. Because the Alpha arranged it and she could not tell you, and because a wolf who is planning to bring down an Alpha cannot have a Beta in her bed. If she had kept the bond, the Alpha would have heard everything you knew and everything she knew through you. So she broke the bond and she walked off the pain on the high ground and she did it alone.”

Declan sat down slowly in the chair.

“Then the broken mark was a thing she did to protect me,” he said.

“The broken mark was a thing she did to protect the whole village. And she could not tell you because the Alpha would have heard it in your head the moment she told you.” I came round the table and put my hand on his shoulder. “And she has been in the north all this time building a thing that will put her on the seat. That is why she paid the men from Galway to tell me she is alive. She did not want me to grieve. She wanted me to know she is coming.”

The door of the cottage opened again and Cormac came in with his coat open and his face white and a thing in his hand.

“She has closed the hall,” he said. “She has put a lock on the green door and she has put Tom and two of her wolves outside it and she has called the families to the pier for Saturday morning instead of the hall.” He put the thing in his hand down on the table. It was a note, in Mairéad's hand, and it was addressed to the families of the co-op. “She has put it up on the shop door. It says the co-op will meet on the pier at nine o'clock on Saturday to see the Mary Rose off and to hear a statement from the enforcer about a claim of rogue status against a woman from Dublin. And she has written at the bottom, the hall is closed until the matter is settled.”

Declan picked up the note and read it. His face did not change.

“She is not going to let us into the hall,” he said. “She is going to hold the meeting on the pier with the enforcer standing beside her and the whole village watching the boat go out, and she is going to have you declared a rogue in front of the co-op before you can say a word about a vote. And there will not be a wolf on that pier who will stand up for you, because she will have told them all a story before Saturday morning and there is not a wolf in this village who has ever stood against her.”

I looked at the note and then at the phone on the table and then at Padraig.

“Then we do not wait for Saturday,” I said. “We do it tonight. The pack swore the oath in the garden and the pack said aye in the garden and the pack is not the hall. We go to the families tonight, one by one, before she gets to them. And we tell them the truth about the safe and the deed and the anchor and the men from Galway, and we ask them to come to the pier on Saturday morning and stand on the right side of the line.” I picked up the weight out of my pocket and put it on the table. “And there is a thing I have been putting off. The phone from Galway has a number in it and the number is the one my sister gave the men in March and the word they were to say is Dún. I am going to telephone it tonight. And if my sister is on the other end of it, then on Saturday morning the co-op is going to hear her voice.”